Of Time and the River (28 page)

He despised them: he loathed them because they were dull, dirty, and dishonest, because their lives were stupid, barren, and ugly, for their deliberate and insolent unfriendliness and for the conspiratorial secrecy and closure of their petty and vicious lives, entrenched solidly behind a wall of violent and corrupt politics and religious fanaticism, and regarding the alien, the stranger, with the hostile and ignorant eyes of the peasant.

All of the men had a dry, meagre, and brutal quality: Mr. Murphy was a little man with a dry, corky figure; he had a grey face, a thin sunken mouth, around which the line of loose mockery was always playing, and a closely cropped grey moustache. The boy always found him in his shirt-sleeves, with his shoes off and his stockinged feet thrust out upon a chair. Feeney, O’Doul, Jimmy and Eddy Murphy, although of various sizes, shapes, and ages, all had thick tallowy-looking skins, hard dull eyes and a way of speaking meagrely out of the corners of their loose thin mouths. Mrs. Murphy was physically the biggest of the lot, with a certain quality of ripeness and fertility, however blighted, that none of the others had: she was a large slatternly woman, with silvery white hair which gave her somehow a look of sly and sinister haggishness; she had a high, flaming colour marked with patches of eczematous red, her voice was hearty and she had a big laugh, but her face also had the false, hostile and conspiratorial secrecy of the others.

Eddy Murphy, the youngest boy, was also the best of the crowd. All decent and generous impulse had not yet been killed or deadened in him; he still possessed a warped and blunted friendliness, the rudiments of some youthful feeling for a better, warmer, bolder, and more liberal kind of life. As time went on, he made a few awkward, shamed, and inarticulate advances toward friendship; he began to come into the young man’s room from time to time, and presently to tell him a little of his life at college and his hopes for the future. He was a little fellow, with the same dry, febrile, alert, and corky figure that his father had: he was one of the dark Irish; he had black hair and black eyes, and one of his legs was badly bowed and bent outward, the result, he said, of having broken it in a high-school football game. The first time he came into the room he stood around shyly, awkwardly, and mistrustfully for a spell, blurting out a few words from time to time, and looking at the books and papers with a kind of dazed and stricken stupefaction.

“Watcha do wit all dese books? Huh?”

“I read them.”

“Guh-WAN! Watcha tryin’ t’ hand me? Y’ ain’t read all dem books! Dey ain’t no guy dat’s read dat much.”

As a matter of fact, there were only two or three hundred books in the place, but he could not have been more impressed if the entire contents of the Widener Library had been stored there.

“Well, I have read them all,” the other said. “Most of them, anyway, and a lot more besides.”

“Guh-WAN! No kiddin’!” he said, in a dazed tone and with an air of astounded disbelief. “Watcha want to read so much for?”

“I like to read. Don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. YOU know,” he said painfully, with the slightest convulsive movement of his hands and shoulders. “. . . ‘S’all right.”

“You have to read for your classes at Boston College, don’t you?”

“DO I?” he cried, with a sudden waking to life. “I’ll say I do! . . . HO-ly Chee! Duh way dose guys pile it on to you is a CRIME!”

There was another awkward silence; he continued to stare at the books and to fumble about in an embarrassed and tongue-tied manner, and suddenly he burst out explosively and triumphantly: “Shakespeare was de greatest poet dat evah lived. He wrote plays an’ sonnets. A sonnet is a pome of foihteen lines: it is composed of two pahts, de sextet an’ de octrave.”

“That’s pretty good. They must make you work out there?”

“DO they?” he cried. “I’ll tell duh cock-eyed world dey do! . . . Do you know who de greatest prose-writeh was?” he burst out with the same convulsive suddenness.

“No . . . who was it? Jonathan Swift?”

“Guh-WAN!”

“Addison? . . . Dryden? . . . Matthew Arnold?” the youth asked hopefully.

“Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN!” he shouted derisively. “Yuh’re way off!”

“Am I? . . . Who was it then?”

“James Henry Cardinal Nooman,” he crowed triumphantly. “Dat’s who it was! . . . Father Dolan said so. . . . Chee! . . . Dey ain’t nuttin’ dat guy don’t know! He’s duh greatest English scholeh livin’! . . . Nooman wrote de Apologia pro Vita Suo,” he said triumphantly. “Dat’s Latin.”

“Well, yes, he IS a good writer,” said the other boy. “But Thomas Carlyle is a good writer, too?” he proposed argumentatively.

“Guh-WAN!” shouted Eddy derisively. “Watcha givin’ me?” He was silent a moment; then he added with a grin, “Yuh know de reason why you say dat?”

“No, why?”

“It’s because yuh’re a Sout’paw,” and suddenly he laughed, naturally and good-naturedly.

“A Southpaw? How do you mean?”

“Oh, dat’s duh name de fellows call ‘em out at school,” he said.

“Call who?”

“Why, guys like you,” he said. “Dat’s de name we call duh Protestants,” he said, laughing. “We call ‘em Sout’paws.”

The word in its connotation of a life that was hostile, hard, fanatic, and suspicious of everything alien to itself was disgraceful and shameful, but there was something irresistibly funny about it too, and suddenly they both laughed loudly.

After that, they got along together much better: Eddy came in to see the other youth quite often, he talked more freely and naturally, and sometimes he would bring his English themes and ask for help with them.

Such were the Boston Irish as he first saw them; and often as he thought of the wild, extravagant and liberal creatures of his childhood—of Mr. Fogarty, Tim Donovan, and the MacReadys—it seemed to him that they belonged to a grander and completely different race; or perhaps, he thought, the glory of earth and air and sky there had kept them ripe and sweet as they always were, while their brothers here had withered upon the rootless pavements, soured and sickened in the savage tumult of the streets, grown hard and dead and ugly in the barren land.

The only person near him in the house, and the only person there the boy saw with any regularity was a Chinese student named Wang: he had the room next to him—in fact, he had the two next rooms, for he was immensely rich, the son of a man in the mandarin class who governed one of the Chinese provinces.

But his habits and conduct were in marked contrast to those of the average Oriental who attends an American university. These others, studious seekers after knowledge, had come to work. Mr. Wang, a lazy and good-humoured wastrel with more money than he could spend, had come to play. And play he did, with a whole-hearted devotion to pleasure that was worthy of a better purpose. His pleasures were for the most part simple, but they were also costly, running to flowered-silk dressing gowns, expensively tailored clothes cut in a rakish Broadway style, silk shirts, five-pound boxes of chocolate creams, of which he was inordinately fond, week-end trips to New York, stupendous banquets at an expensive Chinese restaurant in Boston, phonograph records, of which he had a great many, and the companionship of “nice flat girls”—by this he meant to say his women should be “fat,” which apparently was the primary requisite for voluptuous pulchritude.

Mr. Wang himself was just a fat, stupid, indolent, and good-hearted child: his two big rooms in the rear of the Murphy establishment were lavishly furnished with carved teak-wood, magnificent screens, fat divans, couches, and chests. The rooms were always lighted with the glow of dim and sensual lamps, there was always an odour of sandalwood and incense, and from time to time one heard Mr. Wang’s shrill sudden scream of childish laughter. He had two cronies, young Chinese who seemed as idle, wealthy, and pleasure- loving as himself; they came to his rooms every night, and then one could hear them jabbering and chattering away in their strange speech, and sometimes silence, low eager whisperings, and then screams of laughter.

The boy had grown to know the Chinese very well; Mr. Wang had come to him to seek help on his English composition themes—he was not only stupid but thoroughly idle, and would not work at anything— and the boy had written several for him. And Mr. Wang, in grateful recompense, had taken him several times to magnificent dinners of strange delicious foods in the Chinese restaurant, and was for ever urging on him chocolates and expensive cigarettes. And no matter where the Chinaman saw him now, whether in his room, or on the street, or in the Harvard Yard, he would always greet him with one joke—a joke he repeated over and over with the unwearied delight of a child or an idiot. And the joke was this: Mr. Wang would come up slyly, his fat yellow face already beginning to work, his fat throat beginning to tremble with hysterical laughter. Then, wagging his finger at the young American, the Chinaman would say:

“Lest night I see you with big flat girl. . . . Yis, yis, yis,” he would scream with laughter as the young man started to protest, shaping voluptuous curves meanwhile with his fat yellow hands—“Big flat girl—like this—yis, yis, yis!” he would scream again, and bend double, choking, stamping at the ground, “nice flat girl—like this—yis, yis, yis, yis, yis.”

He had perpetrated this “joke” so often, and at such unseasonable places, that it had now become embarrassing. He seemed, in fact, to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty years, and whose name was Fust. Nothing could be done to stop him; protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, “Yis, yis, yis—nice flat girl—like this, eh,” and would shape fat suggestion with his fat hands.

XVI

The purposes of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated school for dramatists seemed, as stated, to be plain and reasonable enough. Professor Hatcher himself prudently forbore from making extravagant claims concerning the benefits to be derived from his course. He did not say that he could make a dramatist out of any man who came to take his course. He did not predict a successful career in the professional theatre for every student who had been a member of his class. He did not even say he could teach a student how to write plays. No. He made, in fact, no claims at all. Whatever he said about his course was very reasonably, prudently, and temperately put: it was impossible to quarrel with it.

All Professor Hatcher said about his course was that, if a man had a genuine dramatic and theatrical talent to begin with, he might be able to derive from the course a technical and critical guidance which it would be hard for him to get elsewhere, and which he might find for himself only after years of painful and even wasteful experiment.

Certainly this seemed reasonable enough. Moreover, Professor Hatcher felt that the artist would benefit by what was known as the “round-table discussion”—that is, by the comment and criticism of the various members of the class, after Professor Hatcher had read them a play written by one of their group. He felt that the spirit of working together, of seeing one’s play produced and assisting in the production, of being familiar with all the various arts of the theatre—lighting, designing, directing, acting, and so on—was an experience which should be of immense value to the young dramatist of promise and of talent. In short, although he made no assertion that he could create a talent where none was, or give life by technical expertness to the substance of a work that had no real life of its own, Professor Hatcher did feel that by the beneficent influence of this tutelage he might trim the true lamp to make it burn more brightly.

And though it was possible to join issue with him on some of his beliefs—that, for example, the comment and criticism of “the group” and a community of creative spirits were good for the artist—it was impossible to deny that his argument was reasonable, temperate, and conservative in the statement of his purposes.

And he made this plain to every member of his class. Each one was made to understand that the course made no claims of magic alchemy— that he could not be turned into an interesting dramatist if the talent were not there.

But although each member of the class affirmed his understanding of this fundamental truth, and readily said that he accepted it, most of these people, at the bottom of their hearts, believed—pitiably and past belief—that a miracle would be wrought upon their sterile, unproductive spirits; that for them, for THEM, at least, a magic transformation would be brought about in their miserable small lives and feeble purposes—and all because they now were members of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated class.

The members of Professor Hatcher’s class belonged to the whole lost family of the earth, whose number is uncountable, and for this reason they could never be forgotten.

And, first and foremost, they belonged to that great lost tribe of people who are more numerous in America than in any other country in the world. They belonged to that unnumbered horde who think that somehow, by some magic and miraculous scheme or rule or formula, “something can be done for them.” They belonged to that huge colony of the damned who buy thousands of books that are printed for their kind, telling them how to run a tea-shop, how to develop a pleasing personality, how to acquire “a liberal education,” swiftly and easily and with no anguish of the soul, by fifteen minutes’ reading every day; how to perform the act of sexual intercourse in such a way that your wife will love you for it; how to have children or to keep from having children; how to write short-stories, novels, plays, and verses which are profitably saleable; how to keep from having body-odour, constipation, bad breath, or tartar on the teeth; how to have good manners, know the proper fork to use for every course, and always do the proper thing—how, in short, to be beautiful, “distinguished,” “smart,” “chic,” “forceful,” and “sophisticated”—finally, how to have “a brilliant personality” and “achieve success.”